Pagina's

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Salesperson Prototypes from Hell

I spent a lot of time on the subway today and instead of working on some job-related tasks or thinking about serious things like the state of the world, I was wondering what the worst traits are in shop assistants. These are the five things I came up with: too clingy, arrogant, ignores you, overly social and incompetent. I made a matrix out of them, describing what the resulting behavior of their combination might be. A sort of mini sociological study. I realise this might be offensive to both shop assistants all over the world and sociologists, but hey, I was bored. Click to see full size!

Do you always get treated well? Are you sometimes put off by bad personnel? Or do you just provoke them a bit for kicks?

3 comments:

I think your descriptions are pretty accurate...but there are those wonderful moments when you have the perfect shopping experience. :) I worked as a retail associate for five years, and I honestly loved it. I tried to tread the line between apathy and annoying, and I think I did okay. :)

This analysis is so awesome, haha. I'm sure everyone who'll read that post will agree with the different traits you chose.

You can also put the name of a store for each traits. For instance, Zara would be "arrogant + ignores you", the worse for me. I usually provoke them by asking too many questions about sizes and fabrics. Lame but takes a little bit of my anger out.

Hope: you're right, of course! I think most people try the best they can and usually do a wonderful job.

Absolute B: Not lame, awesome! Costumer service is usual so awful in Europe in general and big chains especially. We should all be a bit more demanding.

Some stores really do fit a certain profile, no matter how many people they employ. Maybe it's got something to do with the organisational culture? Like H&M is mostly a combination of incompetent and ignoring you, because they hire so many teenage girls.